?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
JOHN BIGGERS (1924 - 2001) Gondor Market.
Charcoal and conté crayon on thick wove paper, 1969. 965x749 mm; 38x29 1/2 inches. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection; thence by descent to the current owner.
This strikingly fresh work is part of a group of large drawings from a six-month trip to Ethiopia and Eastern Africa in 1969. John Biggers has drawn many different representations of a mother and child--in crayon, charcoal and lithograph--which, according to Olive Jensen Theisen, explored the spirit of maame, the strong maternal love found in the African family. Gondor Market incorporates this theme--the baby is hidden under the shawl on the mother's back--within a formal study of the contrast found in the textures of the African market. Gondor Market: Ethiopian Market, 1970, in the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph A. Pierce, Jr., is another large drawing from this period. Other African drawings, like Migration, he continued to work on through the 1980s. Theisen pp. 72-73; Wardlaw p. 51.
